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Our plans for today involved getting up, starting the laundry (we packed for only 7 days knowing we’d have a washer here at the time share), and get on a train as soon as possible to go see the castle in Mannheim. However, it turns out that the washer is smarter than the American’s!!! Without being able to read any of the words, and the pictures not really being obvious enough for us, Nashon finally got the help of the manager and our clothes got clean; then comes the battle of the dryer. This time we got the “turn on” part down just fine, but they just wouldn’t dry!! They had pictures of water drops (one drop = 10%, 2 drops = 20%, and 3 drops = 30%). Nashon interpreted this to be “how wet are the clothes you’re putting in.” After two rounds of 30% (the highest number possible), Nashon gives up and talks to the manager again. The manager just shakes his head, places it on the lowest setting, and enters a new coin to make it go. Turns out the % is for how wet do you want your clothes to be when the dryer finishes (i.e. he put it on -2%).  So, our laundry that should have taken a total of 90 minutes instead took us until 2:30pm. We planned on catching the 2:41pm train, but weren’t quite fast enough to the train station, so we caught a train at 3:15pm instead. The reason we weren’t fast enough, is because we stopped at the bakery for a snack before heading on the train. We saw some really yummy looking cinnamon strudel cake, and Nashon was in charge of ordering. He speaks no German, baker speaks no English. There are two cakes in the window (1/4 of a round, and ½ of a round cake with a diameter of 18 inches). She gestures at the big one, then the little one, and Nashon thinks “oh, the first looks yummier” and asks for “two”. Turns out, you don’t get slices, you get the whole cake. So we took a half of a giant cake to snack on for all of today (and probably most of tomorrow)!!!

We learned something today…German’s are very big soccer fans. The second train station we got to had tons and tons of people (big and little) waiting for the train wearing red clothing, scarves, and holding signs. They were all singing songs and being generally annoying (Nashon would say “entertaining”). We had 4-minutes to get from platform 1 to platform 4 to catch the next train (which we’d done successfully every other day here), but were just seconds too slow today and missed the train…Hence missing the palace in Mannheim since it closed before we got there.

So we went to Mannheim anyway, found the castle (now part of the university), and took a few pictures from the outside. We spent some more time walking around the city and looking inside of another Catholic cathedral. We found a mall where we had high hopes of finding German linen. However, the one store we found that may have had something closed about 30-seconds before we walked up, a theme today. So we left the town empty handed after enjoying some Turkish food. Yes mom2, that means that on this trip we’ve had German food, Italian food, Turkish food, and some other things that we don’t really know what they were. J Our high point at the Turkish restaurant was when the owner asked one of the waiters if he spoke English and a young man came over and said “a bit”. He needed to use his English to tell us “5 minutes”, and “please stand here”. I think he may have even used it to say “thank you, goodbye” as we were leaving.

So the short story is that we have nothing big to report today. We spent time waiting for the wash, checked out of the apartment (we leave before they open tomorrow), and watched the ants on the ground while waiting for the trains. Tomorrow will be 12.5 hours on a train through Switzerland to get to Florence.